243: Your Firm Is an Institution
A conversation with Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck about data-driven healthcare design, reusing 80-90% of hospital room data, and linking dRofus standards with Hypar's live 3D planning tools.
Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck join the podcast to talk about data-driven design for healthcare, where a missed clearance or a misplaced outlet stays built into a hospital for decades. We explore why firms treat every project like their first, how as much as 90% of room requirements can be templated and reused, and how a live link between a room-data database and a 3D planning tool lets one equipment change ripple through every affected room. We also get into bringing nurses and department heads into early design, and who should own the data once the building opens.
This episode is especially relevant for healthcare planners, design technology leaders, and firm principals who know their best knowledge lives in a few senior people's heads, and are wondering what it would take to turn it into something the whole firm can use.
Original episode page: https://trxl.co/243
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About This Episode's Partners
This is a special partner episode, produced in partnership with dRofus and Hypar.
- dRofus
- drofus.com
- dRofus is a planning and building information management platform that helps organizations and design teams in healthcare, aviation, government, retail, and more manage room requirements, equipment, space data, and project standards throughout the building lifecycle. By connecting owners, architects, engineers, and contractors around a shared source of truth, dRofus improves collaboration, reduces costly redesigns, and ensures projects remain aligned with operational and capital planning goals.
- Hypar
- hypar.io
- Hypar is 3D space planning software for complex buildings, built for early design. Drop in your program and CAD, then drag rooms into place with walls already sized. Hypar is intuitive enough that clients can help shape the rooms in your design meetings. It checks areas and equipment clearances as you go. Hold several options in one model and change one on the spot. When a client spots a need pre-design missed, fix the requirement and design together in the same meeting. Revit takes over for construction documents.
The Tools in This Conversation
- Hypar
- hypar.io
- Hypar documentation
- Why it's relevant: Hypar’s 3D space planning software, where Espy moves from bubble diagram to exploded axonometric in about two seconds and walks nurses through five layout options with a couple of clicks.
- dRofus
- drofus.com
- dRofus for architects
- Why it's relevant: the structured database David describes for room requirements, equipment, and facility standards, including the change log Espy calls one of its most underrated features.
- Connecting dRofus and Hypar
- dRofus integrations
- How to import a dRofus program into Hypar (video)
- Updating your dRofus program through Hypar (video)
- Why it's relevant: the two-way link the panel keeps coming back to, where a program comes in from dRofus, gets tested as geometry in Hypar, and flows back.
Previous TRXL Episodes
- TRXL 032: 'Punctuated Equilibrium', with Anthony Hauck
- TRXL 003: 'A Local Maxima', with Ian Keough
- TRXL 014: 'A Degree of Nuclear', with Andrew Heumann
- TRXL 048: 'How it Started; How it's Going', with Ian Keough and Clifton Harness
- TRXL 175: 'Realtime Decision Making', with Ian Keough and Keith Fine
- TRXL 202: 'Knowledge Management is Everyone's Job', with Katie Robinson and Christopher Parsons
About Espy Harper:
Espy Harper, M.Arch, EDAC, SSGB, is the Innovation Leader and an Associate Principal at LS3P. She spent more than 25 years as a healthcare planner, the one in the room who kept asking "what if" and pushing to find out whether something could be done, and that habit eventually became a firmwide role. Today she works on how LS3P brings new technology, digital workflows, and research into everyday project delivery, with a focus on getting past pilots and into adoption that lasts. Her background in evidence-based design shapes how she sees a firm's accumulated room data: pair it with how spaces perform, and you can answer questions for clients that no one could answer before.
About David Spehar:
David Spehar is the Regional Sales Manager for the Americas at dRofus, where he helps organizations adopt data-driven design workflows. A registered architect since 1994 and an early BIM adopter, he spent more than a decade managing large, complex architectural projects before moving into design technology implementation at large architecture firms and then joining dRofus. He calls himself a recovering architect, and says the customers he talks to today are still fighting the same problems he fought 20-some years ago. That practice-side memory shapes how he talks about structured data: as a way to get hard-won knowledge out of senior people's heads and into something the whole team can use.
About Anthony Hauck:
Anthony Hauck is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Hypar, which he started with Ian Keough in 2018 to build space planning software for complex buildings, with healthcare at the front of the line. Before Hypar he spent more than 20 years across architecture, engineering, construction, and IT, followed by a decade at Autodesk as Director of Product Management for Revit and then Director of Product Strategy for AEC Generative Design. Knowing documentation models from the inside gives him a clear sense of why early design needs something faster and looser. He's also personally interviewed two dozen healthcare planners about how they carry knowledge from one project to the next.
